


Beer of the Future

by jmtorres



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Drunkenness, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-30
Updated: 2003-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-09 07:44:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You want to know it? The truth? The real, absolute, total truth about Immortals?"</p><p>Joe eyed Methos warily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beer of the Future

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Unbetaed bit of randomosity.  
> 2\. In a way, I blame 7 Days: Frank Parker *also* used beer to talk about time travel.  
> 3\. The title comes from a passage which sounds something like this: "Beer of the future! I fear you more than any alcoholic beverage I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to drink you in good company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me? Lead on, Lager." If anyone knows why Methos has been rewriting Dickens into an ode to beer, please tell me. It's been driving me up the wall.

"You want to know it? The truth? The real, absolute, total truth about Immortals?"

Joe eyed Methos warily. Methos was shit-faced. Methos was prone to making up supposedly historical anecdotes when he was sober, but his tendency towards invention increased exponentially when he was drunk. He seemed take it as a personal challenge to put one over on Joe, and it was apparently worth more points if he could do it handicapped.

"Sure," said Joe, who lived in hope of one day getting the real story out of Methos. "Tell me the truth about Immortals."

Methos leaned forward, resting his elbow on the table and the side of his face on his fist. His feet, which had been tangled with Joe's prostheses under the table, went away; glancing down, Joe realized that Methos's posture change had involved wrapping his long legs around the legs of his chair.

When Methos had eye contact with Joe again, he said in a dramatic whisper, "We're time travellers."

"Right," Joe said sarcastically. "You're not actually living forever, it's just you stretch your time out. You don't actually go to sleep every night, you time travel ahead eight hours. And if we lost track of you for a century, well hey, the seventeen hundreds were boring, so you decided to skip a few decades."

"No, no, no," said Methos, impatiently. "We're from the future." He paused. "Well, actually, I'm not sure of that. Never mind that bit. Look, the thing is--" He stopped, frowning, and picked up his drink.

"The thing is?" Joe prompted, curious despite of himself.

"Conservation of matter!" Methos said triumphantly, pointing at Joe with one finger while holding onto the rim of his glass with the other four.

"Conservation of matter?" Joe repeated, groaning inwardly. It was going to be one of *those* sorts of tales. Methos had a natural knack for languages and history, and had made a grand study of anatomy, but he had never shown any aptitude for fields of science that required more than basic arithmetic. He was much more comfortable with creation myths featuring lonely gods than with the Big Bang and associated theories of expansion of the universe. Any attempt to use physics resulted in a vaguely deist story, as if Methos were struggling to reconcile science with an older, more primitive worldview.

"How does it go?" Methos asked. "The amount of matter in the universe is fin--the amount of energy--the amount of matter and energy in the universe is infinite. Definite. Something."

"Finite," Joe suggested. "I think you had it the first time."

"That," Methos agreed. "You can change matter into energy, or energy into matter, but you cannot destroy them, and you can't create them out of nothing. That's the important bit, the not creating."

"It is, is it," Joe said tolerantly.

Methos nodded seriously. He set his drink down and waved over it. "Now, see, if, one minute from now, I were to send this glass of beer back in time one minute, what would happen? What would we see?"

Joe scratched his head. "Two glasses of beer on the table?"

"Exactly!" Methos said happily. "For one minute, there would be two glasses of beer. Then I'd send one back and there'd only be one glass. But for the one minute, there would be *extra* *matter* *in* *the* *universe.*"

Joe gave a slow, incredulous nod. "Right."

"Now, do you know what would happen if you drank the beer before the minute was up?" Methos asked, with the air of telling a grand joke.

"What?" Joe asked.

"Nothing!" Methos crowed.

Joe raised his eyebrows.

"You couldn't get drunk off it," Methos explained. "The universe reacts to protect itself from having too much matter by somehow tying up the extra matter so it can't interact with other matter."

"One beer wouldn't get me drunk anyway," Joe protested. "How cheap a date do you think I am?"

"Don't you see, Joe?" Methos asked, leaning forward precariously again. He was balancing his chin on his hands and somehow in danger of toppling. "It's why we can't age! We're extra matter, so we can't interact normally with the rest of the matter in the universe."

Joe gave this some thought, and demanded, "So how come you can get drunk off of beer that's not from the future?"

"I can't. I'm dismember--dis--December--dismemble--dis--I'm faking," Methos replied.

"You're laying it on pretty thick," Joe said wryly.

Methos beamed at him and emptied the glass down his throat. "Tastes good, anyway. But, look. It explains all kinds of things. How come Immortals show up as foundlings, no mum or dad? Because they've been randomly dropped into the past. And Quickenings! Quickenings." Methos nodded as if this were very significant.

"What about Quickenings?" Joe asked.

"Something happens," Methos explained, "when an Immortal dies, so that the matter in his body can't be kept out of the rest of the universe anymore. Something to do with rotting, I think. Anyway, a Quickening is the annihi--the destruction. The destruction of matter. So that there stops being extra matter."

Joe considered this, then pointed out, "But the bodies don't go anywhere. Or the heads. So the matter can't be destroyed."

Methos shook his head fervently. "It's not the matter in the body that's destroyed. It's an equal amount of matter from the air. Gas is easier to fuck with than liquids or solids. But, see, that's why the storms. Raging clouds drawn in to fill the vacuum that occurs when the air near the body goes *foosh.*" Foosh was apparently the sound of gaseous matter being annihilated from existence.

"So how do you explain the fact that you guys interact with the rest of the universe just *fine* until first death?" Joe said.

Methos's shoulders slumped. He rested his hand flat on the table and his chin on his hand. "Okay, so it's not a perfect theory. But it explained so much!"

"It's a *theory?*" Joe demanded. "You told me that it was the absolute, total, complete, unabridged truth about Immortals!"

"Look, all I know is, I was damn well mortal *before* I stepped in the bloody TARDIS, so *you* tell me what happened," Methos said sulkily.

"The TARDIS," Joe repeated doubtfully.

"Figure of speech," Methos retorted.

"Are you saying," Joe asked carefully, "that you *remember* going back in time?"

Methos looked up at Joe and nodded seriously. "It wasn't supposed to make us Immortal," Methos said sadly, pushing himself up. He played idly with the empty glass. "Just scatter us throughout history so they couldn't find us. Like in the Trek episode--the one where Spock went all prehistoric and got laid?"

Joe groaned. Two science fiction references in under a minute, not counting the concept of time travel itself. He was doomed. "How far in the future are you supposed to be from?" he asked. It might limit the number of available references.

Methos shrugged. "Dunno. Different time scale. If someone dropped you into the sixth year of the reign of the eighth king of Elbonia, could you figure out how long it was until 2003 anno Domini?"

"So you have no recollection of the two thousand year historical period in your past during which people *were* using A.D. to count years?" Joe asked.

Methos shook his head. "I don't think anybody *was.* But that's because Christ was Immortal--the bloody bastard didn't exist in the original timeline. We changed history." He paused. "Oops."

"Oops?" Joe repeated in disbelief.

"Never interfere--that was our credo first, before it ever was yours," Methos went on moonily. "Went right down the drain and out the window at the first opportunity. Like I said. Oops."

"First opportunity to what?"

"Get laid, of course," Methos replied.

"Of course," Joe echoed fondly. "So, you wanna go change some history, or what?"

Methos smiled at him sunnily. "Why, Joe, I thought you'd never ask."

**Author's Note:**

> Also archived on dreamwidth: <http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/384922.html>


End file.
